About

About fast.ai

fast.ai is dedicated to making the power of deep learning accessible to all. Deep learning is dramatically improving medicine, education, agriculture, transport and many other fields, with the greatest potential impact in the developing world. For its full potential to be met, the technology needs to be much easier to use, more reliable, and more intuitive than it is today. We are:

Writing fast and easy to use software for both developers and end users

Developing a complete educational framework

Building a library of ready-to-use applications and models

Working on hybrid “man and machine” solutions that harness the strengths of both humans and computers

About our slogan

Being cool is about being exclusive, and that’s the opposite of what we want. We want to make deep learning as accessible as possible– including to people using uncool languages like C#, uncool operating systems like Windows (which is used by the majority of the world), uncool datasets (way smaller than anything at Google, and in domain areas you’d consider obscure), and with uncool backgrounds (maybe you didn’t go to Stanford).

About the founders

Jeremy Howard, fast.ai co-founder

Jeremy Howard

Jeremy Howard is an entrepreneur, business strategist, developer, and educator. Jeremy is a founding researcher at fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to making deep learning more accessible. He is also a Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco, a faculty member at Singularity University, and a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum.

Jeremy’s most recent startup, Enlitic, was the first company to apply deep learning to medicine, and has been selected one of the world’s top 50 smartest companies by MIT Tech Review two years running. He was previously the President and Chief Scientist of the data science platform Kaggle, where he was the top ranked participant in international machine learning competitions 2 years running. He was the founding CEO of two successful Australian startups (FastMail, and Optimal Decisions Group–purchased by Lexis-Nexis). Before that, he spent 8 years in management consulting, at McKinsey & Co, and AT Kearney. Jeremy has invested in, mentored, and advised many startups, and contributed to many open source projects.

Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas, fast.ai co-founder

Rachel Thomas was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI, earned her math PhD at Duke, and was an early engineer at Uber. She is a professor at the University of San Francisco and co-founder of fast.ai, which created the “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course that over 100,000 students have taken. Rachel is a popular writer and keynote speaker. Her writing has been read by over half a million people; has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Korean, & Portuguese; and has made the front page of Hacker News 7x.